So the work that we are doing revolves completely around the deer skulls. There are about 1500 skulls in the Laundry at Kilmory, collected over the 40 year life-time of the Red Deer Project. These skulls vary from almost newly born deer (mummified in a nasty sort of way), through youngsters to mature males and females. These skulls are all stored in old fishing boxes that are packed high up and involve awkward shifting and lifting to get down. However, a large proportion of the male skulls have huge antlers attached and are arrayed along large wooden beams across the ceiling. To get these male skulls down we have to balance on a trestle table and un-latch them from one another. The variation in the antlers is incredible, and apparently Loeske Kruuk has done some work on this that will be coming out soon. Some males have huge wide antlers that look like they would be pride of place on any hunting wall, whilst others are narrow and pointy but apparently these ones can be the lethal ones during the rut, but some are very asymmetrical.

So just to outline what exactly we do (and the methods are the same as in the paper below). When we pull the skull out of its box we firt find the skull on our data sheets, as the ID method has changed over the years and we need to know whose skull we are about to pour beads into. Then we measure its length using a large set of callipers, so that an idea of brain size to head size may be gained for the individuals. Then we clean the skull..... some of these skulls have been sitting around for over 30 years and so don't have much in the except a few spiders webs, but some are full of dessicated brain, spiders eggs, spiders webs and dried skin. So much pushing, prodding and scraping ensues. Next we fill all of the wholes in the brain case up cotton wool, and often the nose cavity as well. At the start this seemed daunting but we are now pretty au fait with skulls and do this speed and precision. Then we poor 2mm glass beads into the skull, shaking to achieve an even filling, up to our specified point (see paper for exact details). Then we pour it all out into a measuring cylinder and have our volume, simples! Except for those annoying 2 beads that are rattling in the skull and take another two minutes to extract. But thanks to Stuff You Missed in History Class and Lars Brownworths Byzantium podcasts this fairly monotonous task goes swiftly and we learn very random stuff, e.g. about our favourite female adventuress Freya Stark. 

Logan & Clutton-Brock (2013) Validating methods for estimating endocranial volume in individual red deer (Cervus elaphus)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S037663571200232X

So here are some pics of us and the skulls:

In the last week we have been helping Martyn with darting, outside our skull duties. He uses an air-pressured rifle to shoot the deer with darts, then once they have been knocked-out he marks them with ear flashes and cattle collars and then takes various morphometric measurements. It has been fun to help out and he even taught us how to use the gun. Becca is a dead-eyed shot, possible due to her Robin Hood heritage, hitting the bull from 15, 20 and 25 metres. It has been good fun to help out with work outside the skull measurements and see how work on large mammals is carried out. Marking deer is very different from meerkat captures or babbler ringing. We are also now able to ID at least a few deer: the one’s we helped mark!

We had a wander over to Harris, and on our way we spotted a peculiar South African rock formation. Right in the middle of Rum there is a group of mountains that look like Devil’s Peak, Table Mountain and Lions Head!! All together and even with a long low hill that resembles Signal Hill, I felt very home sick for the Mother City!

We have a new biggest skull: Samson, at 450ml and from some preliminary plotting of the data we have found, not very surprisingly, that skull length appears to be positively correlated with cranial volume. But there is a fairly large amount of variation, with some animals having very big volumes to their lengths. In addition, from looking at the data as we have been entering it in, individuals who are related seem to have a fairly similar volume: length ratio. We haven’t looked into this statistically but it’s just some anecdotal observation. So hopefully there may be some heritability, which Corina will hopefully be able to show (if it’s there).

On our walk down into the village this morning we also heard our first cuckoos of the year, so spring has arrived in Rum.

I have added a few pics from our wanderings, our office view and some long exposures that I have taken from the beach at Kilmory!